Melinda Rainey Thompson and Morgan Murphy collaborated on the humor book 'I Love You -- Now Hush.' In the early 1990s, Murphy was a student of Thompson's when she taught English at Birmingham-Southern College. 'He minds me well,' she says. 'We have a good arrangement.' (The Birmingham News / Michelle Williams)They make a mostly unlikely pair, Melinda Rainey Thompson and Morgan Murphy.

She is a petite, suburban mother of three who does four loads of laundry a day and worries about looking like a hussy because her skirt is a half-inch above her knees.

He is a gangly, married-without-children entrepreneur and classic-car buff who smokes cigars and wears a three-piece suit even to work in the garden.

"Peanut butter and pate," Thompson likes to say. "I am like the store-brand peanut butter and he is the pate."

Yet, when Thompson, a former English professor turned humor writer, hit a wall about halfway through her third book, she immediately thought of Murphy, a magazine writer and one of Thompson's old students at Birmingham-Southern College, to help her out of her creative jam.

"It was a eureka moment -- like when you have a pound cake in the oven and you know the pound cake is going to be perfect even before you cut into it," Thompson recalls. "Morgan was the man for the job."

Murphy knew better than to tell her no.

"I minded," he says. "Melinda calls you, you come over."

The result of their collaboration is "I Love You -- Now Hush," a collection of "she said/he said" humor pieces that offer the female and male perspectives on everything from balancing a checkbook ("Just take the bank's word for it," she says) to keeping house ("Put out a want ad for a maid," he says) to doing yard work ("I'd rather scrape cat throw-up off the carpet," she says) to romancing your significant other ("Get nekkid," he says).

The authors will launch the release of "I Love You -- Now Hush" with a book signing on Jan. 28 at the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood and then embark on a two-week book tour around the Southeast.

Although they live only a few miles apart -- Thompson in Homewood and Murphy in Mountain Brook -- they hardly saw or talked to each other while working on the book.

"It was a pretty 21st-century way to write," Thompson says. "We met maybe two times in person. We talked on the phone less than five times. It was almost all e-mail."

The 46-year-old Thompson, who grew up in Greenville, graduated from Tulane and got a master's from UAB, became a writer almost by accident.

The stay-at-home wife of Alabama Court of Civil Appeals Judge Bill Thompson, she started writing a humor newsletter about the everyday trials and travails of being a housewife and mother after the birth of her youngest child 11 years ago.

"It was merely something I wrote during nap time," she says. "I didn't have time for the academic kind of research-based writing, but humor was fast and easy and fun."

She called her newsletter the SWAG Letter -- "SWAG" being short for Southern Women Aging Gracefully -- and from her initial readership of about 20 friends and family members, her circulation grew to about 5,000 subscribers in 48 states, Thompson says.

"That's a little more highfalutin-sounding than it was," she says. "I'm counting Delaware. I had two people in Delaware."

In 2006, Thompson parlayed the success of her newsletter into her first book, "SWAG: Southern Women Aging Gracefully," and the next year, she released a follow-up, "The SWAG Life."

Surprisingly, she says, she has a lot of male fans.

"I never expected men to read," Thompson says. "Originally, I was a little bit taken aback. I thought, 'This isn't for you; this isn't your business.'

"But I get tons of-mails. I get letters. They come to book signings. So they do read."

The ill-fated reporter

Murphy, 37, grew up in Mountain Brook and got interested in writing at Birmingham-Southern, where he was the editor of the student newspaper, the Hilltop News, and one of Thompson's favorite students.

"Morgan stood out from the very beginning," Thompson says. "He was very bright and very funny from the beginning."

In 1993, media mogul Rupert Murdoch came to BSC on a visit, read the student paper and offered Murphy a job at any one of his newspapers, Murphy says. He chose The New York Post.

"My first night in New York, it was the worst snow storm in 30 years," he recalls. "They threw me the keys to the company station wagon and told me to drive down Flatbush Avenue into Brooklyn and report on a little lady who had been shot seven times.

"I had never been to New York. I had never driven in the snow. I had never done honest-to-God reporting. I talked about new math professors -- not somebody who had been shot seven times."

Murphy decided he might be better suited for magazine writing instead of crime reporting, and he subsequently wrote for Vanity Fair, Forbes and Esquire and worked seven years at Southern Living.

While living in New York, Murphy met opera singer Amy Campbell while singing Gilbert and Sullivan together at Carnegie Hall in 1998. They got married three years later, and Murphy persuaded his "Southern-impaired" wife to move to Alabama.

Although they live in a "child-free zone," as Murphy likes to say, he and his wife are the proud parents of an English Springer Spaniel named Gilbert (his playmate, Sullivan, passed away last year) and a West Highland Terrier named Guinevere.

Last spring, Murphy launched Motorpool.com, a social networking site for classic car enthusiasts.

"It's like Facebook for car people," he says. "We can talk about carburetors and tail pipes and things without looking like massive geeks."

The best medicine

They might not appear much alike, but Thompson and Murphy say they have more in common than many people might think.

"Men, of course, say Morgan is entirely right in his view of everything, and women say I'm right," Thompson says. "But we are actually very similar people in many ways.

"If we were married to one another, we would kill one another, you know what I mean?"

And they both agree that a daily dose of humor can be therapeutic, and to illustrate her point, Thompson relates a story about a fan who read her "SWAG" books while undergoing cancer treatment.

"Those stories and those letters make you feel like you've done something incredible to change somebody's life," Thompson says. "We're not going to cure malaria worldwide, but it's two minutes of distraction from something awful for somebody and that matters."